These folks are interesting for a couple of reasons:
- They are making saké in Texas.
- They use Texas rice to make their saké.
- If it matters to you, the rice they use and the saké they produce are both organic.
Mike the Musicologist and I went down to their tasting room yesterday and had a flight of the four varieties of saké they currently produce. Their Tumbleweed Saké is a very dry, kind of light tasting saké; it really doesn’t have any kind of assertive flavor, just a kind of dry mouth feel. I believe Mike liked this one the best out of the four. As for me, I think this is an excellent drinking saké, but not a sipping one.
I slightly prefer the Whooping Crane for a clear saké. This has some nice floral notes, and is closer to what I’d consider a sipping saké.
The Rising Star is an unfiltered saké with a very assertive taste. I think this would match very well with food; I’d like to try it with some barbecue, perhaps.
The fourth saké we had was a “double nigori” unfiltered saké. If I remember correctly, not only is that one unfiltered, but they add additional rice sediment in the brewing process. Again, this is another one that I think would pair well with food; the taste is even more assertive than that of the single nigori.
Don’t get me wrong: all four of the sakés we had were very good, and I commend them to your attention. Mike, who is more of a saké connoisseur than I am, commented that they tasted different than what he was used to. Not “bad”, just “different”. I suspect that there are several factors involved; brewing style, perhaps, or a taste difference between Texas and Japanese rice. If you’re not a fan of Japanese saké, the Texas saké may still be worth a try for that reason. In Austin, you can find at least some of them at Whole Foods and Central Market.
And I’d also like to note that the folks at the tasting room – Toji, the head brewer, and the young lady who was helping him – were very nice to us. The tasting room isn’t a big place, and there were quite a few people there, and we didn’t have reservations, but they still went out of their way to make us feel welcome.
Unfortunately, the tasting room is closing down for the summer: it also doubles as the brewery, and apparently it is just too hot to make saké during the summer in Texas. But Texas Saké is having their second anniversary party on September 28th, so you might clear your calendar if you live in the Austin area.
These are swell folks, and they make an excellent product. I’d very much like to see them succeed to the point where they can’t sleep at night because there are too many $100 bills stuffed in the mattress.